Here’s a quick social hack for you. In this ever-increasingly global village we’re living in, having to grapple with foreign names is becoming a lot more common. Especially online, one of the more frequent problems I run into is determining gender based on a name, without even a voice to help clarify.

Google to the rescue. I’ve found that dropping the first name in Google Image Search often answers the question for me. Not 100% of the time, and I’m still loathe to use a gender-specific pronoun without further investigation, but it’s a good guess most of the time.

Now if I could just keep track of which cultures place their family name on the left instead of the right…

Well, Ara, alot of “A” names similar to yours are girl names, like Aria or Ariana, etc. In fact, I’ll admit, I thought you were a girl before I saw your about page, but that’s why I checked. :)

Actually, I’m glad to see a post about this because one of my clients is a Kris and for the longest time I was dying to ask, but couldn’t think of a polite way to do that. I know a lot of gals spell their name with a K but then there’s Kris Kristofferson (sp?) so who knows. Turns out the full name is Kristofer. :)

A phone call doesn’t always work because I’ve known some girlie sounding guys and some scruffy smoky sounding gals.

Natalie: You know, I find that just coming out and asking sometimes works equally well. You know saying something like: “this is a little embarrassing but would you mind if I asked your gender as it’s kind of tough to tell from your name?”

This same sort of awkward thing happens when I run into people I don’t always see and forget their names. I find that getting over the awkwardness quickly, early on in the encounter just by asking works well. Especially if you’re apologetic about it.

Who cares if an online persona is a girl or a guy? Doesn’t it matter more how that person acts, what they say?

But it’s funny that you should post about this. I ran a test in an online (counter-strike) community. For about a year they had no idea whether I was a girl or a guy, as I refused to tell them.

Interestingly enough they all thought I was a girl as I was so ‘shy’, and almost instantly everyone was incredibly nice to me. Eventually I agreed to tell them my name if they guessed it correctly, and when they eventually did, I told them it and no harm done. (and yes, still loved)

I do wonder however, if I’d have gotten as much attention if I’d given them my name immediately…

Forget exotic-sounding names (especially to our anglophonic ears), what about common, yet gender-neutral ones? Some have already been mentioned, like Kris or Jamie or Casey, then there’s the likes of Shannon, Leslie, Alex, Devin… and on, and on, and on.

What I find just as hard is the creative spelling of names now. Amy or Aimee? Casey or Kacy? Heck, let’s look at my name: the one year I played basketball for my school, there was a Sean, a Shaun, and a Shawn on the team. It can be just as offensive to misspell someone’s name as to precede it with the wrong pronoun.

Peter: Even though your name isn’t Peter (followed your link to your site), Petra (the original form of the name) has been used for women as well as men. So yeah, that would explain why you were named “Peter”.

As for pronouns that matter in business. I had a programer friend ones who had a female client on the phone, unfortunately for her she had a deep voice and a male like name (Charli without the E - think short for Charlotte), my friend refered to her as Mr. most of the time - he found out the truth when he went on a meeting with her… Good thing she didn’t take it wrongly.

Well subconsciously I tend to “grade” a name on how likely it is to be either male or female. In Anne’s case (and being Dutch of origin myself), his name is more commonly used for females. If I would not know he was male I’d address him as a female. And I guess he’s used to that ;)

Another example may be Casey. This is a 50/50 shot - I’m fully aware there are both male and female people with this as their first name. What’s to stop me from addressing them as “Dear Casey Lastname” or “Mrs. or Mrs. Casey Lastname”?

As a sidenote, it’s sometimes even a good way to break the ice on the phone if you make a mistake like this. I’ve never met someone who was offended by my mistake, and after correcting myself the talk automatically becomes a tad less “business”-like.

What works best? Give someone in the company a call. Secretaries/switchboard operators will understand why you’re making the call. Just calling to check, you’ll say. We get it all the time, they’ll say. When sending out résumés, it’s nice to know. Same goes for Ms. vs. Mrs.

Also, if you are sneaky and sure they don’t have caller I.D., try also calling their office in the middle of the night. You can sometimes get their voicemail names. Not always going to work nor can you tell from everyone’s voice everytime, but it’s a shot. Beats that shock of when you meet face-to-face for the first time.

To save our daughter such annoyances, we named her the girliest name ever, Emily. Funny enough, it wasn’t until after we named her we found out it was the most popular name of the past few years. Eh well.

My name is Chris and I am a male. It wasn’t until very recently that I started getting correspondence assuming I am female. Maybe that is an indication that the Christines of the world are starting to outnumber the Christophers.

I wonder if any telemarketing company has a database full of the gender percentages a certain name is. That way when they come across a Chris they know there is a “59%” chance it’s a male.

I also agree with the above comments that getting it right is very important in business. I was immediately turned off by the businesses that got it wrong.

Interesting subject. As a male with an unusual name I’ve dealt with this a lot. People I haven’t met but have had occasion to correspond with in writing often assume that I am female.

Unfortunately for those wanting to use this tip to determine my gender, Google shows a bunch of fiery planets and a couple of southern roads. Fortunately for me I’m OK with androgyny. But the situation does say something about the prevalence of preconception.

Being named Lee, I frequently get sex-targeted junk email and snail mail assuming female, but I can assure you that I am quite definately male. I’m not really offended by it, but I would have more confidence in a company that did the research to find out before the fact.

Google Images gives me a real weird collection, from Bruce Lee to a female nude using a vacuum cleaner as a breast pump.

BTW, in informal business correspondance, such as email, it is quite acceptable to greet as:

It’s only going to get more complicated. I’ve been designing an internal database for an organisation in the UK for the past three months. Two months into the project, someone points out that I should have included “other” as a gender; fortunately, it wasn’t too much of a coding challenge. However, when they later started discussing “both,” “neither” and “undecided”, I stood firm that if someone didn’t feel up to choosing today, then they could just stick with other until they could. While gender is a social construct, their database back-end is currently my construct and I didn’t count on that level of polymorphism!

More worryingly for business people, one wonders what to use as a courtesy title for these “others”…

very nice topic. This is my everyday problem. Usually i try to ask very politely. but the solution here worked very good for me, serch in google images.
but remember some names, like mine, is used for both males and females. ( I am male anyways). and you should know from where he or she is.

A person’s gender can be easily discovered regardless of what kind of names is used in the hyper space, nature is nature, no matter of pretending attempts that person is trying to imply the opposite gender, through his / her words.

That’s a neat way, and I have tried it in the past. But I see that most of the times, it is the obscure names that I am having trouble with, and so far, as fate would have it, Google has not been too helpful for me in such cases.

And also, there are certain names which are common for both male and female in Asia, and if you come across such names, then that’s it. No other way of finding it out other than asking the person yourself.

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You are reading “Gender Issues”, an entry posted on 8 June, 2006, to the Bee collection. See other posts in this collection.